Jason Pyeron wrote: > "Inexpensive - Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of > Amazon's > scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually > consume." Which is kinda funny since it's not true in many situations. My company did a cost analysis of using the Amazon cloud vs doing it ourselves, and the cloud cost at Amazon was more than double what we would pay if we did it ourselves(TCO over a 3 year period). And that's just the cost of the services themselves. We do need hundreds of megabits of internet bandwidth, and lots of CPU cycles as well as I/O cycles(and disk space), in the micro pay model that Amazon has it adds up fast.. I'm sure it's more cost effective if the stuff your doing sits idle most of the time. We also priced out a premium enterprise provider that used VMware enterprise and they came in at about 4x the cost of doing it ourselves, CPU cycles in VMware enterprise are of course a lot more expensive than non-vmware or even VMware foundation. The premium enterprise VMWare vendor(Terremark) came within about $15k of the cost of using Rackspace managed hosting(bare metal) to do the same over a 3 year period which I thought was very interesting, shows how expensive managed hosting can be as well(we weren't looking for much software on hands support but rather hardware support, leasing the equipment through them etc). So not surprisingly we're doing it ourselves, which makes me happy as an infrastructure guy. Building new sites and setting up new things is something that keeps me happy. I interviewed some guy for an operations position last week who was proud of the fact they had migrated to the cloud, and it was working great. Then I asked him what kind of traffic do they get and how many servers? They got something like 10,000 requests a DAY, and they had 2 or 3 servers. Big whoop! nate